A High Court judge who handed down an injunction in 2009 ordering an ISP to block The Pirate Bay says he was threatened by "cyber-terrorists" over his decision. Mr Justice Charlton claims that hackers threatened to steal his credit card details, plant child porn on his computer, and send call girls to his home along with mountains of pizza.

As part of a 2009 out-of-court settlement with EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner (collectively IRMA, the Irish Recorded Music Association) ISP Eircom agreed to start disconnecting copyright-infringing customers from the Internet.

But the agreement actually went further. Eircom also agreed that if the labels went to the High Court and asked for an injunction against The Pirate Bay, Eircom would not contest it. The deal worked as planned.

In his July 24th High Court ruling Mr Justice Peter Charleton wrote that The Pirate Bay was “dedicated, on a weird ideological basis” to “stealing” copyrighted material and handed down an injunction ordering Eircom to block the site.

Perhaps understandably Charleton’s ruling wasn’t particularly popular with some customers of Eircom, but according to comments from the judge quoted by Irish Times, disapproval also came from further afield.

The day after the ruling Charleton was informed that the Garda, Ireland’s national police force, wanted to speak with him. Apparently his ruling hadn’t been well received and people were threatening retribution.

“I was regarded as a traitor, would you mind, to freedom of expression on the internet,” said Charleton when speaking at a lecture at Fordham University in the US.

“Threats were made that my life would be ‘wrecked by computer’. The people in question, the cyber-terrorists, were proposing to hack into my computer to get my credit card and other details, order any number of pizzas for my greedy gut and get call girls to turn up to my door and plant child pornography on my work computers.”

Now, while there is no particular reason to doubt the words of Justice Charleton who, incidentally, has made at least one important ruling since 2009 that actually favored file-sharers, the story does take a turn for the unusual.

Delivering mountains of pizza and providing hookers to unsuspecting individuals has all the hallmarks of a 4chan/Anonymous campaign but apparently the threats to Justice Charleton had come from unlikely lands including Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Nevertheless, the threats were taken seriously. Justice Charleton confided in a colleague over the child-porn planting threats and he agreed to provide the judge with an alibi. Technical measures were taken too.

“One precaution was to put up firewalls,” noted Charleton. “These work so well that my computer is so slow that I have stopped using it. So, they did get their revenge.”